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THE AMERICAN FORM OF THE NOVEL
THE novel has always concerned it¬self with such incidents of the life performance as have been found sig¬nificant by the age in which they oc¬cur. Its scope has been combat when combat was the major occupation of men. As the necessity of social ad¬justment operated over the lust of conquest the long story reflected and illustrated the process of such adjust¬ment. When complete stratification had taken place in European society, the story-telling emphasis shifted to the set of circumstances by which the hero was introduced into the social strata in which he was henceforth to function. Thus, where the Greek long story was content to deal with the ad¬venture of arms, the medieval romance made a feat of arms the means, subordinate to the event, of the hero's admission into high society, slaying the enemy as a prelude to marrying the king's daughter and sharing the kingdom. When, however, the goal of man's serious endeavor became, as it did in the last century, some sort of success¬ful escape from social certitude, the scope of the novel was extended to in¬clude the whole ground of his struggle and its various objectives. Then came America and brought a state of things in which uncertainty multiplied as to what the objective of man's secret and incessant search should be. Except in a limited, personal sense we have never known in the United States just which of us is villain and which hero. In addition to the decay of recognized social categories, our novelists find themselves under the necessity of working out their story patterns on a set of shifting backgrounds no two of which are entirely conformable. myself, and I suspect my experience to be typical, have had to learn three backgrounds, as distinct, except for the language spoken, as Paris, Gopher Prairie and the Scottish Highlands. While I do not complain to the gods of these things, I maintain that it gives me a disadvantage compared to Mr. Galsworthy, say, who, however rotten he finds the warp of English society to be, still finds it regularly spaced and competent to sustain the design of any story he may elect to weave. There can be, of course, as many arrangements of the items of indi¬vidual experience as there are ways in which experience can widely hap¬pen. But these are not so many as might be supposed. Varieties of per¬sonal adventure are more or less pulled together by the social frame in which they occur. One of the recog¬nized criterions of veracity in a novel is the question, could, or couldn't, the main incident have occurred in that fashion in a given type of society. But such a question can only be asked by people whp have acquired the ca¬pacity to feel truth in respect to their own environment. It can never be asked by people for whom apprecia¬tions of social pattern, as it affects the literary expression of experience, have been stereotyped to the warp of relationships which are no longer ad¬mitted as social determinants. To readers whose souls are only at home in states of feudal dominance or de¬pendence there is no truth whatever in modern realism. The novel, more than any other written thing, is an attempt to per¬suade, at its best to compel, men to give over for a moment the pursuit of the distant goal, and savor the color, the intensity and solidarity of experi¬ence while it is passing. It is of no particular moment which one of the currents of experience that loop and whirl and cascade and backwater through the stream of human exist¬ence, is selected. It is important, however, that it be presented in the idiom, that is to say, in the life pat¬tern, of the audience for whom it is in¬tended. For every novel that the reviewer elects for critical attention, he dis¬cards a dozen others of possibly equal workmanship, for no reason but that they deal with patterns that have ceased to have—or perhaps never did have—constructive relation to the so¬ciety in which we live. Or, in cases where high veracity and perfection of form compel his admiration, as in The Age of Innocence, he makes his point out of the very failure of validity in the background, itself a fragment of an earlier, outworn social fabric. Be¬low the limit of a possible claim on his attention, every reviewer is also aware of scores of novels, eyeless and amor¬phic, kept moving on the submerged social levels by the thousands of read¬ers who never come any nearer the surface of the present than perhaps to be occasionally chilled by it. Aside from questions of form, is not the difference between novels which compel our attention and those we lightly discard, just this validity of re¬lation between social warp and indi¬vidual pattern? What I mean by pattern is the arrangement of story elements in true relations to the social structure by which they are displayed. It is not necessary that the support¬ing structure of society appear as sub¬ject matter, but a certain clear sense of it in the writer's mind. It is hardly possible yet in America to produce so smooth an over-woven piece as Mr. Waddington of Wyck, with the technique of one of those de¬tached motifs of Chinese embroidery, in which, though everywhere to be traced, not one thread of the sustain¬ing fabric is visible. Miss Sinclair works under the conviction that the cial structure ought never to be 'eated by the novelist as part of his idertaking, but that, I suspect, is due her never having worked on the disconcertingly spaced and frequently sleazy background of American soci¬ety. What we have to look for here is the ability, on the part of the writer, to fix upon the prophetic trend of hap¬penings. Such a novel as Main Street should sustain itself a long time as a record of our discovery of the Com¬munity as villain, or, if you feel as some of us do toward its leading lady, as hero. It is this necessity, forced upon us by recent social developments, of finding new, because as yet unde¬clared, points of balance in the ar¬rangements of the American elements of story design, that has given rise to the notion that in America the novel need not concern itself with form pri¬marily. But this can hardly be the case if we are to think of novel writ¬ing as an art, subject to the condition of survival in time. Form is the shape a story acquires in its passage from the mind of the author to his audience.. That all minds are much alike gives to all no¬tion a recognized quality of form which differentiates what goes by the name of literature from mere reading matter. The minds of any audience living under fairly homogeneous in¬fluence acquire a characteristic recep¬tivity, a peculiarly native manner of turning and tasting their experience before assimilating it, which is bound to be reflected in the shape of the ve¬hicle in which experience is recorded and passed about. The American short story form developed out of our national method of attack on the im¬mediate issue with attention undi¬vided by any concern for the sequence of events. It was, in fact, the lack of sequence in our experience which made the short story for a long time our most expressive literary vehicle. In this sense form in connection with novel writing becomes a matter of the span of perceptive conscious¬ness of the selected audience. This gives, in our inchoate American life, the greatest latitude of incident, but confines the novelist rather strictly to a democratic structure. It deprives him of fixed pals of social or finan¬cial or political achievement as ter¬minal points, since none of these things has any permanence in the American scheme of things. The ut¬most the American novelist can hope for, if be hopes at all to see his work included in the literature of his time, is that it may eventually be found to lie along in the direction of the grow¬ing tip of collective consciousness. Preeminently the novelist's gift is that of access to the collective mind. But there is a curious secret relation between the novelist's point of access and his grasp of form—and by form I mean all that is usually included in style, plus whatever has to do with the sense of something transacting be¬tween the book and its reader. Who¬ever lays hold on the collective mini at the node from which issues tho¬green bough of constructive chant finds himself impelled toward what is later discovered to be the prophetic form. What, after all, is the slow growth of appreciation of a novelist of the first rank, but the simultaneous widening of our social consciousness to a sense of its own direction? American novelists are often ac¬cused of a failure of form. But is this anything more than an admission of failure of access on the part of the critics? Characteristic art form is sel¬dom perfected until the culture of which it is an expression comes to rest. Of all the factors influencing the American novel form, I should expect the necessity, inherent in a democratic society, of conforming more directly, at any given moment, to the state of the collective consciousness rather than to its direction, to be the deter¬mining item. This is what, generally speaking, conditions the indispensable quality of access. Under the demo¬cratic condition it can be achieved only by participation. There is no place in the American consciousness for the superior being standing about with his hands in his pockets, "pass¬ing remarks." The democratic novelist must be in¬side his novel rather than outside in the Victorian fashion of Thackeray or the reforming fashion of Mr. Wells. He may, like Mr. Sherwood Anderson, be so completely inside as to be un¬clear in his conclusion about the goal, but there he is, Americanly, on his way. The reference of personal con¬duct to an overhead Judgment which forced the earlier novelist to assume the god in the disposition of his char¬acters, has here given place to a true democratic desire of man to see him¬self as he is seen by the people with whom he does business. His search is not so much for judgment as for reve¬lation, quick, nervous appreciations of place, relationship and solidarity. But in every case the validity of the American form will rest upon that in¬tuitive access to the collective con- scionsness, which it is the dream, and probably the mission of democracy to achieve.